Since 2002, Organic/Mechanic has been the personal website of Adam Harvey.

Tag: canals

Saturday, 19 June 2010

Yesterday Bram and I spent most of the af­ter­noon at Whiskey Island, fly­ing an owl kite, and get­ting the lit­tle bear com­fort­able play­ing in the wa­ters of Lake Erie. He en­joyed his “swim­ming” lesson. The dude is al­so a chick mag­net, as ev­i­denced by the fol­low­ing pho­to.

I took Bram to Train Day to­day. I in­tend­ed to take him to the Cuyahoga County Fatherhood Initiative’s day at the zoo, but a time­ly Facebook tip as we were head­ing out the door changed my plans. Abraham pret­ty much woke up de­mand­ing trains to­day, so I was hap­py to oblige.

The Cleveland Metroparks Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation is part of the Towpath Trail and is amaz­ing­ly pic­turesque. Pretty much right in the heart of Cuyahoga County too.

The event re­mind­ed a bit of the Old Time Music Festival that I took Bram to in Metamora, IN last year. The whole of Metamora is still his­toric, and they’ve got an old big black steam en­gine and a canal boat that you can take rides on. It’s even got a func­tion­ing wa­ter-wheel-turned grist mill. The Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation has the canal, but no boat or train. There was old-timey mu­sic though, and I sang along to The Wabash Cannonball twice.

Train Day had no up close and per­son­al ac­tu­al trains, but lots of mod­el trains, a hobo trail with re­al live ho­bos, a com­plete­ly awe­some Lego train ex­hibit, and the chance to get right up close to a marsh and spy on some blue herons. Abraham had al­most as good a time as I did. My good times al­ways ex­ceed his be­cause see­ing him have a good time in­creas­es my en­joy­ment ex­po­nen­tial­ly.

We ate an ap­ple with with a hobo named Apple Annie, sat on a bench and ate choco­late fudge ice cream, col­ored a but­ton and looked at trains six ways from Sunday. It helped that the trestle had CSX trains run­ning across it every half hour as well.

Unfortunately, I have no pho­tos or video be­cause, al­though I brought my cam­era, my mem­o­ry card was else­where.

All in all, a good Father’s Day week­end, so far. The dude conked out on the way home from Train Day and is cur­rent­ly snor­ing on my bed. Being a dad is the most ful­fill­ing thing I’ve ever done.